What are their training plans like/how do they compare to TR?
Benny answered it much more concisely than I ever could. Personally, I struggled with TR, the monotony of it (perfect word!) of holding set X power/cadence for X minutes/seconds soon wore me down. It just didn't engage me enough, some people can do it, I couldn't.
Much of the same could be said of Zwift, it works for some, but not others. For me, if I just 'go on Zwift' I really don't achieve much and will struggle to ride for an hour - I'll spend the time riding around smashing people and putting efforts into the couple of sprints/hills/mountains. It's fun, but not so much of a sense of achievement at the end. If I go on and follow a training session/plan, I'm slightly more engaged, having to concentrate more, but still get quite bored of anything over an hour (very similar to TR in this regard). When you're doing a training session on Zwift you're semi-separated from everyone else and the environment. You can see it/them but you can't draft other riders and the environment won't impact your trainer resistance (as you're holding power levels determined by your training, not the environment).
More recently I've been doing more and more group rides and racing on Zwift and utterly loving it! Really engaging, great training and the competition side of it can really give a good sense of accomplishment. Although do you have to take everything with a pinch of salt, there's so many 'bad' riders (zoomers) who are either using hacks, motors, low weight or just bad configurations & connections. They're all over the platform, but there enough other users/riders that you can easily ignore them and hardly notice them now.
Zwift is well worth the trail, I'd recommend one 'getting to know it' ride where you figure things out and test how some of your efforts are on whatever rolling terrain you can find. Another ride following a plan of some kind, theres some GCN challenges on there at the moment where you can enter a prize draw by doing GCN training sessions designed by each of the presenters (there's quite regular things like that on there). If you had time/the legs for a 3rd ride then some of the group organised rides (usually labelled 'base' rides on zwiftpower.com) are good to get into, or ride 'The Pretzel' or 'Volcano' (mountain climbs) on the Watopia map are good tests.
I agree it can look very cartoony. The graphics are nothing compared to most games, but bear in mind the platform has very low requirements for people running it on laptops, iphones & ipads. Think it can even run ok on integrated graphics. Would be nice for a 'premium textures' pack or addon or something for those of us with powerful hardware...
The segment linked finishes well past the summit about 1.5 miles into the descent so you'll miss everyone who just rode up and back again.
Try
this segment, same climb but an extra 600 or so people done it.
That's more like it, still only the pro guys on there - yourself and Dean!
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